1. Learn bash better. Lots of low-hanging fruit there to increase your productivity with minimal effort.

2. Learn how to customize your environment in bash. Know what every line in your dotfiles does. Add to your dotfiles gradually as you learn.

3. If you learn about some cool features in zsh, see if bash has the feature already. If it doesn't, see if you can mimic it easily with your own functions or scripts.

4. If you still want more features, make the switch to zsh and repeat steps 1 and 2 with zsh.

I think the worst is when people see a novel trick and switch to zsh and slam in oh-my-zsh* without knowing any shell basics. Now you have another shell and a big pile of code and you don't understand any of it. This usually won't cause problems, but you almost certainly won't be getting the most out of your shell. You'd be better off in most cases just digging into bash a little deeper.

I use zsh now, but I only switched after learning what bash could do and what its limitations are. I'll reevaluate zsh vs. bash 4.0 at some point, but for now I see zsh installed by default more often than bash 4.0 and it seems to me that most users interested in the best interactive shell experience are still on zsh and I like to learn from them.

* - I think oh-my-zsh is a great project - I'm not knocking it. I've borrowed lots of great stuff from it. But I think you should understand every line of code you are dumping into your environment, whether you are using oh-my-zsh or not.

1) it's a drop in replacement for bash. All those scripts you have around have #!/bin/bash at the top, they will still work exactly as they always have.

2) You can selectively go back through your command history. You can arrow-up to go to previous commands just like in bash. But if you start a command (say, ssh) and then arrow-up you will then be cycling back through the last ways you entered that command. Super convenient.

Or, if you'd like to do this in Bash, and any program that uses readline: In ~/.inputrc

    # Bind the up arrow to history search, instead of history step
    "\e[A": history-search-backward
    # And the reverse (down)
    "\e[B": history-search-forward

    git clone
    git rebase master
    git log

    git r<UP>

  bindkey "^[[A" history-beginning-search-backward

If you don't want to use it, I don't see how that is any of my business. I was just trying to help out somebody who does, so there's hardly any reason to be an ass.

All I'm saying is that most people won't like something that offers no immediate major benefit and has annoying defaults that they have to find an obscure setting to fix. This is probably why so few use emacs, even though it is awesome :)

Of course, a script that has #!/bin/bash at the top will keep working regardless of which shell you execute it on anyway, even a shell with a completely different syntax such as tcsh, because that shebang line will tell the OS to always use bash to execute the script--no matter what shell you're using to invoke the script.

It's different when you source a script (usually done using the eponymous shell built-in) since then the shebang line will be treated as a comment and ignored, and all other lines in the script will be executed in the context of the current shell.

Like Ctrl+R?